Connectivism Positions

I’ve been somewhat peripherally following this discussion on connectivism:
A stand for connectivism: “Contrary to criticisms against this theory, information and knowledge do not only lie in human brains, but in electronic networks that are constantly moving and being shaped.”A stand against connectivism: “If any part of the theory were relevant it would be the recognition of the potential of networking and connecting, but these are ways of learning, the pedagogy. Otherwise, the theory does not describe how we learn, how we make the connections inside of ourselves nor does it describe what we learn.”
If the discussion was being conducted with blogs or an open discussion forum, it would be a bit easier to provide comments (none seem to be linked from the wiki)…or to provide links to others who have provided extensive commentary on networked learning in general. Perhaps of greatest value with concepts of networked learning is, as I’ve stated previously, that it has evolved through many contributors – developed, if you will, in the same manner many of us have been stating learning occurs.

This entry was posted
on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Connectivism.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Connectivism Positions”

The reason this isn’t in a blog discussion is that it’s part of an assignment for a course called Building Online Collaborative Environments. Will Richardson was the SME; I was the instructional designer. The wiki is serving as sort of a walled garden in this case. Yeah, I know–talking about connectivism in a quasi-closed environment is weird. For this assignment, they’re just collecting resources supporting one position or another. You could request to join the space if you wanted to comment on the discussion tabs for those pages, but I think for a course like this that restricting the wiki to class members actually does make more sense than having it completely open and risking vandalism.
In a later assignment, they continue the discussion on their blogs, hosted on edublogs, so the discussion will move out to a more public arena later. If you search for “7-A-3 connectivism” you’ll see several of the blog posts from the later assignment, both from the current session and previous ones. I’m sure the students would get a kick out of you commenting on their blogs if something sparked your interest.
Let me know if you have any other questions about this. I’m quite proud of how this course has turned out, so I’m happy to brag about it a bit.

George – these comments, for and against, seem orthogonal to my reaction to your ELI presentation. Might there be a way to make the discussion less abstract either to sharpen the differences in the views or to show they are really on the same side. I, for one, would benefit from some more concrete examples to show what is at issue. Wikipedia and Facebook are some of the more obvious ones. But what about them supports or refutes the theory?